Strings in HDF5

The Most Important Thing

If you remember nothing else, remember this:

All strings in HDF5 hold encoded text.

You can’t store arbitrary binary data in HDF5 strings. Not only will this break, it will break in odd, hard-to-discover ways that will leave you confused and cursing.

How to store raw binary data

If you have a non-text blob in a Python byte string (as opposed to ASCII or UTF-8 encoded text, which is fine), you should wrap it in a void type for storage. This will map to the HDF5 OPAQUE datatype, and will prevent your blob from getting mangled by the string machinery.

Here’s an example of how to store binary data in an attribute, and then recover it:

>>> binary_blob = b"Hello\x00Hello\x00"
>>> dset.attrs["attribute_name"] = np.void(binary_blob)
>>> out = dset.attrs["attribute_name"]
>>> binary_blob = out.tostring()

How to store text strings

At the high-level interface, h5py exposes three kinds of strings. Each maps to a specific type within Python (but see Compatibility below):

  • Fixed-length ASCII (NumPy S type)
  • Variable-length ASCII (Python 2 str, Python 3 bytes)
  • Variable-length UTF-8 (Python 2 unicode, Python 3 str)

Note that h5py currently lacks support for fixed-length UTF-8.

Compatibility

If you want to write maximally-compatible files and don’t want to read the whole chapter:

  • Use numpy.string_ for scalar attributes
  • Use the NumPy S dtype for datasets and array attributes

Fixed-length ASCII

These are created when you use numpy.string_:

>>> dset.attrs["name"] = numpy.string_("Hello")

or the S dtype:

>>> dset = f.create_dataset("string_ds", (100,), dtype="S10")

In the file, these map to fixed-width ASCII strings. One byte per character is used. The representation is “null-padded”, which is the internal representation used by NumPy (and the only one which round-trips through HDF5).

Technically, these strings are supposed to store only ASCII-encoded text, although in practice anything you can store in NumPy will round-trip. But for compatibility with other programs using HDF5 (IDL, MATLAB, etc.), you should use ASCII only.

Note

This is the most-compatible way to store a string. Everything else can read it.

Variable-length ASCII

These are created when you assign a byte string to an attribute:

>>> dset.attrs["attr"] = b"Hello"

or when you create a dataset with an explicit ascii string dtype:

>>> dt = h5py.string_dtype(encoding='ascii')
>>> dset = f.create_dataset("name", (100,), dtype=dt)

Note that they’re not fully identical to Python byte strings. You can only store ASCII-encoded text, without NULL bytes:

>>> dset.attrs["name"] = b"Hello\x00there"
ValueError: VLEN strings do not support embedded NULLs

In the file, these are created as variable-length strings with character set H5T_CSET_ASCII.

Variable-length UTF-8

These are created when you assign a unicode string to an attribute:

>>> dset.attrs["name"] = u"Hello"

or if you create a dataset with an explicit string dtype:

>>> dt = h5py.string_dtype()
>>> dset = f.create_dataset("name", (100,), dtype=dt)

They can store any character a Python unicode string can store, with the exception of NULLs. In the file these are created as variable-length strings with character set H5T_CSET_UTF8.

Exceptions for Python 3

Most strings in the HDF5 world are stored in ASCII, which means they map to byte strings. But in Python 3, there’s a strict separation between data and text, which intentionally makes it painful to handle encoded strings directly.

So, when reading or writing scalar string attributes, on Python 3 they will always be returned as type str, regardless of the underlying storage mechanism. The regular rules for writing apply; to get a fixed-width ASCII string, use numpy.string_, and to get a variable-length ASCII string, use bytes.

What about NumPy’s U type?

NumPy also has a Unicode type, a UTF-32 fixed-width format (4-byte characters). HDF5 has no support for wide characters. Rather than trying to hack around this and “pretend” to support it, h5py will raise an error when attempting to create datasets or attributes of this type.

Handling of lists/tuples of strings as attributes

If you set an attribute equal to a Python list or tuple of unicode strings, such as the following:

>>> f.attrs['x'] = (u'a', u'b')

h5py will save these as arrays of variable-length strings with character set H5T_CSET_UTF8. When read back, the results will be numpy arrays of dtype 'object', as if the original data were written as:

>>> f['x'] = np.array((u'a', u'b'), dtype=h5py.string_dtype(encoding='utf-8'))

Object names

Unicode strings are used exclusively for object names in the file:

>>> f.name
u'/'

You can supply either byte or unicode strings (on both Python 2 and Python 3) when creating or retrieving objects. If a byte string is supplied, it will be used as-is; Unicode strings will be encoded down to UTF-8.

In the file, h5py uses the most-compatible representation; H5T_CSET_ASCII for characters in the ASCII range; H5T_CSET_UTF8 otherwise.

>>> grp = f.create_dataset(b"name")
>>> grp2 = f.create_dataset(u"name2")